"When I read Antonina Nikolaevna Pirozhkova's memoir of daily life with Isaac Babel I realized that I'd known very little about him. Only his death was famous. And of course until fairly recently most of us had that wrong, too. But I did know his work, though not until the early sixties, when the Meridian edition first appeared. One must begin by telling those who still don't know those stories that they are unusual in a particular way. That is, any one of them, those in Red Cavalry and Tales of Odessa, as well as those extracted only in the last few years from bureaus and closets of old Russian friends, can be read again and again. I don't mean every five or ten years. I mean in one evening a story you read just six months ago can be read a couple of times-and not because the story is a difficult one. There's so much plain nutrition in it, the absolute accuracy and astonishment in the language, the breadth of the body and the height of the soul. You do feel yourself healthier, spiritually speaking, if also sadder-or happier, depending on the story...The fact is, there's a larger, more varied population in Babel's four, five hundred pages of stories than in any three novels of most writers."